Increase Max Cpu For An Lpar on HMC

I'm looking at a p550 with 4 dual core cpu's, that whomever set up specified a max of two physical and two virtual cpu's. It's a production boix, and all the others on the frame are dev & test. They've asked me to bring all of the other boxes down to less than 1 cpu, and let this box have whatever it wants; it's currently cpu bound.

Does anyone have a procedure for increasing the maximum number of cpu's a box can take? I'm assuming a reboot. Note that this isn't simply doing a dynamic move from one box to the other: the issue is that we're bumping up against the maximum, and need to change the maximum for that LPAR.

If you want a partition to take all cores when available the virtual cpu
number must be equal to this number.

You can add a weight to this to prioritize which DLPAR is offered the
available capacity first. Make Dev/Tst/Acc servers donor by assigning lower
weights and give VIOS and backend databases the highest.

And be aware of license constraints!

If the license of the installed software is restricting the number of cores
to use, Oracle RDBMS does for instance, the max the physical cores to this
maximum regardless of the ability to assign more!

In case of license irregularities with Oracle your company will be sued for
more money than you can imagine...
A new Power7 server would be cheaper and faster to inplement in such
situations.

Oracle is usually licensed by core.
From what I understand, Oracle itself has to be configured to use those cores and it is not a dynamic thing.
Even if you did a DLPAR action to add more cores, it will take an oracle restart at least to use the additional cores.

Oracle is not restricted, the license holder is. A license with Oracle is a
contract which states how many cores you obtained and will pay support for.
If it says 3 power5+ cores then you better not upgrade your system to
power7+ iron - nor increase the amount of cores assigned to your DLPAR -
without consulting the contract owner and your licensing officer.

Oracle has the rights to come by and inspect all your systems to see if you
are compliant to the(ir) terms of the contract.

DLPAR's running Oracle should never run with more cores than agreed and be
careful when enabling the setting 'uncapped'.
Only on Power7 systems you can create a dedicated "shared CPU pool" for the
number of licensed cores to share CPU capacity between two or more DLPAR's
running Oracle software.
This can help increase your licensed core utilization significantly and
helps to reduce the need for additional core licenses and support fees...

Another way to increase this is of course running only Oracle in your DLPAR
and not your applications too, as these will eat CPU too and often require
their own licenses too. And you should avoid licensing a core twice that
way.

So contact the one responsible for software licensing within your company
and ask for details.

Make sure it will not be easy for Oracle to find evidence they can hold
against you.
You should however make sure you have a clear and crisp overview of how
many systems with how many cores run which specific softwares such as
Oracle.
And you should be able to refresh this report in a fairly easy and proper
way, to show Oracle you have nothing to hide.

This will be crucial as evidence once Oracle sues you out of the blue for
infringments or starts to try selling you a lousy exadata system in
exchange for not being compliant in the past.

They are evil, so you should be prepared and aware of the limits set and
kept.

> **
> Reply from Sybillness on Oct 19 at 9:53 AM Bart,
>
> Where in Oracle can I look for the core licensing restriction? I am having
> an issue on a 550 where it is not utilizing all it's cores.
>
> Thanks in advance for any insight you can give me.
>
> Stephanie
>

As you said its a Power 6 server, you can make use of MSSP[Multiple Shared Processor Pools] to group servers with similar application/databases and set upper limit with Maximum Physical Units (MaxPU).
This helps in reducing Oracle license costs.
MSSP feature is available in PowerVM Standard.

To comply with Oracle rules we began a paractice to separate the Oracle LPARs from all other application LPARs. This way as other experts stated we create the LPAR with capped processors for the number for cores that Oracle license was obtained. This was we don't need to worry about it eating up CPU from other systems and increase it whielwe know it wil violate the licencen agreement. For all other LPARs we let them take CPU from shared pool and they are fine.